It should be obvious that the Democratic Party is not the party of working people. It is barely a party at all. In the absence of a clear purpose it simply reflects and enforces the status quo: neoliberalism, austerity, and whatever the rich people that fund the party want at any given time.

Over here in California, a considerable wave of excitement was building around SB 562, a bill that would can the current healthcare system in the state and replace it with a single-payer structure. For supporters, there was budding optimism. The current national framework created by the Affordable Care Act seems doomed, either through legislation or executive neglect. Polls indicated strong support, and though support dropped when the prospect of new taxes was raised, studies showed that implementation was probably not nearly as expensive as projected. The Democratic Party holds the governor’s office and has big majorities in both houses of the legislature. And single-payer had been passed twice during the Arnold Schwarzenegger administration.

But it died this week when Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon shelved the bill. Activists I know are, as expected, absolutely livid. Part of the anger comes from how illogical SB 562’s death was. There was the means, motive, and opportunity to change things, but that didn’t happen. Political paralysis in a one-party state.

There are two ways to look at this. The first, pretty common among lifer Democrats, is that this was a bug in the system- SB 562 should have eventually become law, and there needs to be a couple small changes to make sure the next time (whenever that is) it succeeds.

The second is that this failure is a feature of the political system. A key piece of evidence is that single-payer has gotten through the obstacles that doomed it this time around, but in a different context:

Similar bills passed the legislature fairly easily in 2006 and 2008, only to be vetoed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. At a time when premiums were rising and there were few other proposals out there, it was an easy vote for Democrats certain of the governor’s veto.

When legislators craft bills that are guaranteed to receive a veto, what they produce is more marketing than ideology. Republicans and their endless ACA repeals passed between 2010 and the end of the Obama administration were this- political theater. In the theater, the chains of pharmaceutical and insurance influence are invisible. It tells activists that the Democratic Party can be the vehicle of progressive action, even if that never happens when cards are on the table. The California Democrats haven’t lifted a finger on higher education affordability, the housing shortage, and healthcare. The main shift since Brown took office is from purely symbolic action to milquetoast half-measures, which are passed but don’t change the trajectory of any social problems.

The failure of SB 562 will make Rendon a convenient boogeyman. There will undoubtedly be a campaign to remove him from office, or his position of power in the Assembly. It will disguise the truth: that both major parties take cash from the only groups that lose out in single-payer.

The Democratic Party feeds on the dreams of its most active members- it is the fuel that makes everything else happen. SB 562 didn’t die immediately, preserving the idea that the future is within the Party, and that the important thing is the next election. More time, more money, and what was promised will be fulfilled.

Not much is known for sure, other than that the dead man was “acting erratic.” A woman identified as his sister said he had mental health issues. According to the NBC report, the police “did not release details on the specific threat he presented to officers.” There is also contention about whether the police confiscated cell phones of bystanders who may have had video of the incident. They likely did, given how often the police aim to suppress video that may run counter to police testimony. There’s also little reason to give police the benefit of the doubt. Look no further than the recent allegations of gun planting in Charlotte and a much clearer case of planting in 2011 in St. Louis.

The killing of a mentally ill man echoes last year’s killing of Fridoon Nehad, which involved a long fight to release surveillance footage of the incident. The details I covered in December 2015 here. A big similarity in these cases is the difference between being erratic and being dangerous. Erratic behavior has many sources- in Olango’s case it looks like a seizure is the reason. A variety of disorders like bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and some types of depression can also make individuals confused and incapable of responding to police demands- which are often given loudly, on top of one another, and with a very small time window for compliance. At my low point in 2012 when my mental health was worst, I could have easily been described as erratic. And I now realize that can put my life at risk, in a way never before considered.

Alfred Olango, from twitter.com/uaptsd

Police protocol in these cases is infested with ableism. It assumes a perfectly compliant, quick, enthusiastic response to police orders. If someone fails on any of these counts, their life can be in danger. Sometimes the cops will just open fire before any real attempt at less-lethal options- Fridoon Nehad was shot by an officer who spent about 25 seconds from parking his car to killing him. But consider the case of Charles Kinsey, a black man shot for trying to help a young autistic man in his care, Arnaldo Rios. Kinsey served a perfectly compliant surrogate for someone who was unable to do so, and yet police did open fire on Rios, missing and hitting Kinsey instead. The resulting trauma for Rios has been awful, with him not getting proper therapy. But many people with mental or development disorders don’t survive their encounters with police. Robert Ethan Saylor, who had Down’s Syndrome, was tackled and asphyxiated over a dispute about a movie ticket. Again, defensive behavior or tics was interpreted as a threat. People who are deaf or hard of hearing routinely suffer from violence, since a basic assumption is that all people can hear instructions. And of course, many people don’t speak English, so being yelled at in the foreign language is just confusing and may lead to so-called ‘erratic’ actions. Police always filter civilian behavior through a lens of perfect ability. That is, those who are not fully able and somehow lesser and more likely to be targets of violence. The most vulnerable sections of the population are threatened by the institutions that in theory should protect and serve them.

These issues would be much less prevalent if American police really committed to deescalation, and had proper understanding of the symptoms and nature of mental illness. I was even part of a county program in 2014 that helped explain mental illness and stigma to schools, crisis lines, and yes, police departments. But it’s not working- street-level cops still can’t process disability at any level. The existence of the ADA, and the sense that people with mental and physical disabilities have rights has no place among the police.

The true answer, to help make sure there is never another Alfred Olango, is community policing. Community members and organizations band together to help keep things safe, using their pre-existing trust to make bonds that the police will never be able to. And a community effort means more local knowledge, including those who live with mental or developmental disabilities. Communities also don’t want gun homicides and violence- they have the most vested interest in deescalation. Restorative justice can change mindsets in a way mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline cannot.

Alfred Olango is not the first, not in this country or this county. But he is a reminder that police departments have the most sinister and deadly ableism one can imagine.

San Diego will participate in 022, the October 22nd National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Event details are on Facebook here. The national event website is here.

“I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases — smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication,” Stein said. “Like any medication, they also should be — what shall we say? — approved by a regulatory board that people can trust. And I think right now, that is the problem. That people do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.”

followed up later with this, mentioning controversies with the use of hormone replacement for menopause, and treatments for Alzheimer’s that backfired:

it’s really important that the American public have confidence in our regulatory boards so that all of our medical treatments and medications actually are approved by people who do not have a vested interest in their promotion.

My mother, a psychiatrist, was concerned about Stein’s take on vaccines, so I did some research to make sure I had all the needed context.

The Washington Post story, which is the norm among large, nonpartisan media outlets, takes a skeptical look at Stein’s claims, assuming that the formal independence of the FDA more or less as true.

The closest Stein gets to anti-vaxx arguments is here:

“There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines. There were real questions that needed to be addressed. I think some of them at least have been addressed. I don’t know if all of them have been addressed.”

Pretty different from what her remarks were being portrayed as. At its core, Stein doesn’t believe that vaccines have any of the purported negative effects that are common currency among anti-vaxxers. Nor does she see any existing issues as overriding the massive public health necessity of vaccination. In fact, she specifically says vaccination rates need to go up in light of Jenny McCarthy and others. As she said on Twitter, the issue is that government agencies have a credibility problem. Even if their statements are 100% true, the intensive lobbying by pharmaceutical companies, and a revolving door between the FDA and private industry, invites skepticism. And indeed that is part of why parents may choose to ignore warnings about things like vaccinations. Even if “the FDA is a tool of Big Pharma” is unrelated to “vaccines are essential for public health,” it can muddy the waters.

The industry’s multi-faceted influence campaign has also led to a more industry-friendly regulatory policy at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that approves its products for sale and most directly oversees drug makers.

Most of the industry’s political spending paid for federal lobbying. Medicine makers hired about 3,000 lobbyists, more than a third of them former federal officials, to advance their interests before the House, the Senate, the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other executive branch offices.

I’ve been a registered Green from mid-2009 until today, minus the time myself and many others registered independent to vote in the Democratic primary this year. In years past, Green ideology was a complete mess. It was sort of socialist, sort of capitalist, and alternatively enthusiastic about and skeptical of science. Going to a party conference, I was frustrated by the lack of coherence and a tendency towards conspiracy theories and quack medicine.

This election cycle is different, because the primaries have manufactured a large disenchanted bloc of voters who see Stein as an answer. This has had the effect of making Green ideology more consistent, and pushing out its more kooky aspects. An amendment to the 2016 platform was passed by the National Committee to make the Green Party explicitly anti-capitalist and move towards eco-socialism. This would resolve the ambiguous take on economics in Green politics and give the party something to stand on. The party this year also voted to remove support for practices like homeopathy. I do believe that Jill Stein has been part of the solution rather than the problem- her status as a doctor makes outsiders more likely to listen, and since her run in 2012 there has been pressure to move beyond a niche party.

Your vote in November is yours alone. Don’t let people bully you into a decision. If you are in a swing state, it’s a tough decision and in some sense I’m glad I don’t have to make it. If you live in a safe state, a vote for the Greens would be huge. A large result would secure millions in public funding, improve ballot access. Minor parties spend more money on litigation to get on the ballot than anything else. And even if Clinton wins, a 5%+ for Stein shows that the Sanders movement against politics as usual has survived.

So I was reading a 2012 report by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) recently. Over 750 college students were surveyed, with NAMI attempting to determine views of mental illness among young adults, and the quality of campus services. The report is located here (PDF).

Most interesting to me is the data on disability accommodations (pages 12-13). While there is a lot of current data on students and mental health, they usually focus on counseling services. In that area, the rate of students getting help has sharply increased, though college-age adults remain the group least likely to seek help. This isn’t a terribly good survey in terms of research design, but any information is good.

A couple key insights emerge, which I’m fairly confident would hold in a more rigorous study.

There is a substantial difference between how many people with mental health conditions who know about accommodations, and those that actually use them. About 20 points separate the two.

Disability resource centers are orientated to physical disabilities, and aren’t designed with psychological conditions in mind.

Among those that dropped out of college due to mental health issues, getting accomodations may have kept them in school.

The conceptualization of disability in the United States has created these conditions. This gap between physical and mental doesn’t emerge from modern disability law necessarily, where the definitions are broad and inclusive. Rather, society has yet to shift its perspective on mental illness. Some tendencies:

People discount any claimed disability that is not clearly visible to outsiders. When I served on a county disability commission a couple years ago, a long impromptu discussion broke out during a meeting about people being harassed for parking in the special spaces because they didn’t “look like they needed it.”

The stigma against mental illness and disability are different, and a sizable group of people accept their belonging in the former group but not the latter.

The type of assistance given to people with psychological conditions, including more time on exams, exams in a quiet room, and longer deadlines, may seem unearned by those who qualify. Accomodations otherize. If you take your exams in a different room, or have different deadlines than your classmates, there may be resentment.

Faculty treat psychological accomodations as less important than physical accomodations.

The disability office as an institution is caught in the crossfire. It can be a key part of students succeeding in college, but many people have no concept of mental illness as being connected.

UC campuses received poor scores on the accessibility, diversity, and outreach of their mental health services

This is part two of a series on UC mental health and the campaign to reform it. A previous post outlining areas of concern is located here.

The UC Students Association (UCSA) has released their evaluation of campus mental health resources, part of a new reform campaign (#HowAreYou) which was adopted last August. Three areas were measured: accessibility of the system, diversity of current staff, and extent and quality of outreach.

Results: not good. UC students would be appalled if their own academic grades were this bad. Campuses scored best on outreach, which is the least important of the three criteria. The core issue is accessibility. Diversity among counselors is only meaningful if students can get appointments within a reasonable amount of time- and are allowed a sufficient number of sessions per term. Outreach is key- it destigmatizes mental illness, and plays a key role in the increasing number of college students looking for treatment in the last fifteen years. But effective outreach magnifies accessibility issues. The more students who seek Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) or an equivalent service, the more meaningful staff to student ratios become. It’s clear that the rise in demand for counseling and psychiatry is outpacing general student growth and funding allocations.

The increased need by students for campus mental health services has resulted in an overtaxed delivery system at UC that falls significantly short of meeting the actual student demand and expectation for services

The cumulative toll of this shortfall in service capacity has had and continues to have a significant negative impact on all campus populations, including other students, faculty and staff; on the affected individual student’s academic performance; and on that student’s overall mental and physical well-being.

Further, it is the Committee’s considered view that this situation will not improve over time, and indeed given general societal trends can only further deteriorate, without aggressive intervention on the part of the institution. This intervention must include a systematic review of policy, enhanced communication mechanisms, and a renewed commitment to campus-wide collaboration along with an infusion of new resources commensurate with both the nature and magnitude of the challenge now facing the University.

As usual, the issue boils down to money. The reason is the corporate-like administrative structure that ties up over a billion dollars more than is needed to run the UC. A low-cost, high revenue structure will always underfund student services like counseling. This combines with the ‘progressive’ state government abdicating its duty to provide quality higher education. Thus we are told that any investment in students will raise tuition, because in 2016 there is increasingly little difference between private and public universities. Remember how K-12 is a right, but once you hit around 18 education becomes a paid-for privilege? Students and faculty are hostages of a mindset we see in corporations all the time, where investment in people makes the system uncompetitive.

With that out of the way, I’d like to talk about the disability services for students, in the context of mental health. There are several names for this office:
Office for Students with Disabilities at UC San Diego and UCLA;
Disabled Students’ Program at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara;
Student Disability Center at UC Davis;
Student Special Services at UC Riverside;
Disability Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz;
Disability Services Center at UC Irvine; and the Disability Services Office at UC Merced.

When #HowAreYou was first presented in a public meeting at UCSD, I had issues with its depiction of a full coalition of groups and university services. I like the focus on collaboration- as improving mental health is not just about psychologists but peer mentors, wellness education, student groups, resource centers, etc. But mental illness as disability was never mentioned. Laws like 5150 involuntary commitment were mentioned, but the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was conspicuous in its absence.

Updated design of the International Symbol of Access

Under the ADA, the definition of disability (Section 12102) is broad and non-exhaustive. In public perception, the term “disability” has been strongly tied to physical disability. The International Symbol of Access is the image most closely tied to the concept of disability- part of an inherent bias towards conditions that others can perceive and verify. Part of stigma is how people may not perceive psychological issues as potentially chronic or severe.

So let’s turn the three branches of #HowAreYou– accessibility, diversity, and outreach. All of this is based on my own experience, the experience of many friends and people I come across, and hour-long meetings with a case worker who deals with the largest portion of students seeking help with psychological conditions, dedicated to talking about the mental health system.

Accessibility: There are many different accessibility issues inherent in psychological conditions being the basis of disability accommodations. Here are some that come to mind initially:

Especially in cases of mental health, there are few connections between disabilities office and other parts of the university. Professors rarely, if ever, talk about it or put information on their syllabi. It’s seldom a topic of conversation in student groups.

Documentation is difficult for someone with no prior experience.

The ratio of case workers to students leads to logjams early in each term as everyone is trying to get their accommodations set and given to professors.

Faculty may block accommodation requests, which the student must then solve by going back and forth between the office and faculty.

Diversity: The same issues exist here, as it does when talking about CAPS.

Case workers and staff must be equipped to deal with a very broad spectrum of disabilities (movement, deafness, blindness, learning disabilities, anxiety, depression, mood disorders, PTSD)

Students may lack confidence in a staff member without shared experience (for instance, a deaf person may feel their obstacles can’t be fully experienced, or a depressed student may feel their issues are being devalued because it’s not visible)

Students may come from cultural backgrounds that don’t talk about mental illness, and may stigmatize those who have problems. This is brought up frequently by Asian Pacific Islander (API) students, and is relevant with both CAPS and disability services.

Outreach: Stigma is a big factor here, but I’m very insistent here- the stigma of having mental health problems is very different from the stigma of having a disability. So campaigns launched by #HowAreYou will have limited effect if they are only talking about the direct stigma of mental illness.

The disabilities office, like CAPS, is given a very limited slice of time in orientation. With so much information in a day-long event, students are unlikely to follow up with the office if they had heard about it for the first time.

Faculty aren’t trained at all about disability accommodations. Thus they often treat accommodations as guidelines rather than legal rights. If faculty have to go out of their way to meet standards, they will often refuse to honor entitlements.

Many faculty are new to teaching, or from countries that do not have an equivalent to the ADA. So a large chunk of teachers every year will have no prior experience with the system.

Because mental health is usually placed in a therapy/treatment rather than disability context, anti-stigma campaigns rarely address that there are two stages of stigma of mental illness.

The disabilities office rarely has a robust outreach component. They will table at resource fairs and present at orientation, but there is rarely a push to get staff and student mentors in club meetings, classes, and hold events specifically about disability.

It should be said that everything here applies more to psychological disabilities than other types. Many people have no idea psychological conditions are legally disabilities.

So this concludes my second post about mental health in the context of the UCs and the #HowAreYou campaign by the UC Students Association. I welcome any information by those that have experience with disability services and mental health, especially outside UCSD.

My next post will be about the structure of how students give accommodations. An exchange with someone at a community college in Northern California shows that there are multiple ways to go through the process, and I think some are superior to others.

Last week, my campus was the site of the Genocide Awareness Project, a traveling display of graphic images about abortion. At two stories high, and long as a large bus, it was by far the most elaborate monument to anti-abortion thinking I had ever seen. It occupied prime space on Library Walk, the main artery of UC San Diego campus. Very few people knew it was coming, so the first day it was met by an ad-hoc group of women’s resource center people and activists.

The second day was much more organized, with close to a hundred people at its peak. The number ebbed and flowed over several hours as people left for class and returned. People chanted “My body! My choice!”; one student protested topless, feeling anti-abortion crusades are only one of several movements that want to dictate what women can do with their bodies.

Pro-choice counter-protest, Library Walk, UC San Diego (1/20/2016)

There are a lot of things wrong with the Genocide Awareness Project, besides the usual shock-value pictures and culture of intimidation. Posters equated abortion to the Holocaust. Another had a picture of Eric Garner captioned “I Can’t Breathe” alongside an aborted fetus. As you can see in the above image, the trope of abortion being ‘black genocide’ was invoked. The entire display rests on problematic (and often offensive) connections being drawn to link abortion (which American society is split on) to the Holocaust, a self-evident mass injustice. In the end, I found last week troubling. In particular, there’s no evidence that the Genocide Awareness Project was invited by a student or student group. Looking through the online space reservation system, the space was allocated to the group behind the Project- the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Traditionally, Library Walk is divided between the central portion, for student groups or canvassers (for Southern Poverty Law Center or Save the Children usually), and the two ends, which are free speech zones for anyone. Non-student anti-abortion protestors last year were allowed to set up on one end of the Walk by the library, but this year had six slots worth of space front-and-center. This, along with a lack of due notice to students- who may have wanted to avoid that part of campus for personal reasons, or allowed time to organize the larger counter-protest, made the whole experience feel uncomfortable.

That said, I would like to dive into a related conversation that came about during the counter-protest. There were sign-making materials on site on Wednesday, so I took advantage and made this sign:

I felt it necessary to go beyond talk of a right to choose and deal with the most disturbing part of the anti-abortion movement to me. Namely, how militant the rhetoric of groups have become, and how violence against patients, doctors, staff, and security in one form or another is common. Claims that abortion is an ongoing Holocaust, if believed sincerely, justify murder as righteous action. Right-wing hate crimes, including incidents like the 2008 shooting at a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee, show how extreme speech can convince certain kinds of individuals that they have a God-given duty to kill.

At one point, I was told that my poster was unfair to tie these murders by to the movement as a whole. A majority of activists practice non-violent struggle.

To some degree, I agree with that critique. It is unfair to assign an entire movement moral complicity in murder (and more numerous lesser crimes, like assault and vandalism). However, I also think that claiming non-violent methods does not mean a lack of connection to any violent acts automatically. In the modern developed world, almost every civil society groups will espouse non-violence. That does not mean that they are equal What follows is a few things that should be considered when evaluating the anti-abortion movement as nonviolent.

Activists claiming to be non-violent may condone violent acts done by others. Many individuals against abortion praise killings and assault of doctors and patients. After last year’s shooting that killed 3 and wounded 9 in Colorado, many took to social media in support of the crime. Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue and long-time leader of the movement, stated the following when Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed at his church in 2009:

“George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.

“Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.” (source)

I don’t see this as a statement endorsing non-violence. Instead, I see it as using non-violence to deny responsibility, but still support violent action. This strategy devalues peaceful strategy by connecting it to the use of force.

The tactics of the movement are fundamentally violating. Since 1973, the anti-abortion movement has taken two paths. The first is political, including the passage of the Hyde Amendment and restrictions on abortion clinics. The second, which we all think of when picturing the conflict, are attempts to block, intimidate, and trick women from entering clinics.

I don’t see tactics of intimidation, which includes things like the Genocide Awareness Project, as truly non-violent. If we take the narrow definition of violence, which it is the absence of force, then the movement describes itself accurately. However, it’s limiting and inaccurate to exclude actions that are violating by their nature. Yelling at a woman that she’s a murderer and waving a gory picture in her face is not non-violent action. The rhetoric is aggressive enough that those who commit crimes to stop abortions don’t need to do much ideological shifting.

Traditional examples of nonviolence are different from the characteristics of those against abortion. A big issue are ties made between those that oppose abortion and the campaigns of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. Both became known for non-violence, but their struggles were about the powerless against the tyrants. The relationship between activists and the system were inferior-superior. There is no great tyrant in the abortion debate- the principal population attacked are vulnerable women. Well-funded groups and conservative politicians are those with tyrannical power.

Ideologies and movements are never strictly violent or non-violent. They exist in a conversation between physical force and moral force. While the anti-abortion movement may adhere to non-violence at some surface level, it is built on a fundamentally violent premise.